My goal going into this project was to hone my game development skills by creating a finished, polished product. I chose to recreate an existing game because it would allow me to practice my technical game development skills without the additional burden of needing to experiment with the game's design.

I found myself spending the bulk of development time on asset creation. I wanted to make sure everything looked finished and presentable, so I revised sprites multiple times and made unique sprites for every user interface element. This is also the first project in which I've rigged and animated sprites. Every plant and zombie is animated, often with several layers of animation that overlap. This was difficult to do, but I'm happy with the result. I think it really adds a lot of life to the game, makes it significantly more visually appealing.

I began work on this project shortly after completing a college-level sound design course, so this is one of the first games in which I crafted all of the sound effects by myself. This was a lot of work, but I'm glad I did it. The sounds make interacting with the game a lot more satisfying.

While programming this project, I focused on creating clean, readable, extendable code using object-oriented design techniques. This ended up making the programming overall easier, especially later in the project, where I could reuse more of my already written code. I don't intend to return to this project, but if I did, I'm certain that programming new plants, zombies, and levels would be easy due to the high-quality code I already have in place.

Overall, I think I achieved my goal of creating a finished, polished product. The core game has good visuals with no real rough edges, a well-populated soundscape, and high-quality, well-organized code. Having completed this game, I feel much more confident in my technical abilities as a game developer.

This is the first game I've fully completed in the Godot engine. Building it made me more confident in the engine's strengths, but also made me aware of some of its weaknesses (particularly its lack of support for many object-oriented features, such as interfaces).

Developing the game engine was by far the most difficult part of this project, as it's something I've never done before. But I'm really glad I got the chance to try it, because it taught me so much about how game engines work on a fundamental level. Additionally, this is the largest project I've ever built in C++, so it allowed me to improve my C++ coding abilities a lot. I now understand C++ quite a bit better and feel more comfortable working in it, which is great.
The actual game of Spider Shoot was a lot of fun to design. I especially like that the player's 'silk shot' ability is capable of both killing enemies and repairing the grid - it's a nice piece of dual-purpose design that makes the game a lot more interesting. Overall, I think the game is a ton of fun and very polished for a week-long project. I'm very proud of how it came out.

The game has one of the most unique concepts out of anything I've worked on. You play by learning about the boat characters through clues in their dialogue, and then use your romantic intuition to help them find their soulmate. Designing such a unique concept with my team was a lot of fun, and it helped me practice my skills at designing unique gameplay systems. The core of this game rests heavily on writing and character design, which is an aspect of game development I haven't explored much in my other projects, so it was a lot of fun to try it out here. This game is also the largest collaborative effort out of any of my projects; while there were only 3 core developers, assets were contributed by 10 voice actors and 4 artists (see the in-game credits for more details).

Antline is the first game I’ve developed that is both self-directed and thoroughly planned. I spent several weeks simply finalizing a game design document and planning out achievable deadlines. Because of this, Antline boasts a tightly focused design and clean, bug-free code. My development of Antline has been heavily focused on the ‘background mechanics’ of the game (UI, currency system, persistent player data, etc), which I had mostly neglected in my past projects. As a result of this focus, the game feels much more like a full release. I see Antline as an enormous success in that I was able to make a realistic plan and stick to it, and also in that the final product is both fleshed out and genuinely enjoyable to play. 

6 people is the largest team I've worked on for a game jam, and I was amazed at how much we could get done. I especially appreciated the excellent work of our dedicated artists, who produced a great selection of 2D sprites and 3D models, which gives the game a unique 2D/3D blended aesthetic. Working with 2 other programmers on the same project was somewhat difficult, but it allowed me to learn a lot about how to use version control for game development. Having so many people to design core gameplay systems allowed us to organize our code really effectively - this is definitely the highest quality code I've ever written for a game jam. I'm especially proud of the Fork AI system, which was built on a finite state machine and rigorously designed and outlined beforehand. I extended the system to allow forks to 'collaborate' by requesting that nearby forks join them for a group activity (like pushing the toaster). Forks that receive these requests can choose to deny or accept them based on various aspects of their current state. The system is elegant, clean, and works very well. It's definitely my favorite part of this project.

This was the first 48-hour game jam where I've been able to get external playtester feedback before the game was finished, mostly because of how fast I've gotten at coding physics-based movement. This feedback was really helpful, as it guided us to add several key gameplay systems, including hay bales and teams. Designing a local co-op minigame was a very interesting challenge - we wanted to strike the right balance of approachability, skillful gameplay, and chaos. In the end, I'm very happy with how the final game plays. It has a unique, chaotic gameplay loop that always gets players excited.